I'm so proud of Animation Mentor and all the lives and dreams we help to shape. I feel very honored to get to do this work and feel inspired by the passion every one of our students has. Here is a great video put together by our outstanding video team. It was their concept to put this together and they have done an outstanding job. So stoked!!!

I've spent a chunk of time over the last 6 weeks looking and commenting on peoples animation. It's been a TON of fun and I'm enjoying it greatly. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts I hope can help you out in your work.

1. A lot, and I mean A LOT, of people seem to end their shots in a superman type pose. It's either one hand on hip, both hands on hips, chest puffed out, or some derivative of this. There are SO many options people have and I see a lot of people defaulting to this cliche.

2. The next one is a continuation of #1. Many people have their characters stop by the end of their shots. In production we're always asked to animate "handles." Generally you animate 10ish frames before and after your shot. This does a few things:
a. It keeps the motion blur working up past the shot so that it doesn't magically stop by frame 123; i.e. end of the shot
b. It also helps make it feel like the character is alive and not perfectly animated within a box of time
If a song ends when it's over, an animation needs to cut out at a place where the song is not quite finished.